We’ve been treated to a little of everything in Criminal Minds: Evolution season 4: cold cases, familiar faces, in-house murders, Mr. Pathetic, and so much more. But it’s not over yet. With three episodes left, we still have more cases to solve and victories to celebrate.
In episode 7, while the BAU team was hunting two cop killers, Voit was getting answers. After wondering who his “fan” was, the man posed as a grieving family member and met with Voit. We see him struggle after learning he’s met his admirer and what he needs to do with this new information. Meanwhile, Penelope and Rossi make amends as JJ learns Henry got accepted to his college of choice.
Updates and changes
Penelope coaches the BAU team on celebrating Henry’s big news as she hears JJ and the boys arrive. Henry isn’t surprised at all, so Rossi thinks JJ told him. No, she didn’t. Michael rats them out, laughing about all their cars being around the corner. Smart kids! Henry thanks and hugs his Auntie P as JJ walks away and talks to Prentiss.
We get an update on Spence and his congrats to Henry. But of course, he’ll make a call to Caltech if needed. If that didn’t make us tear up, Prentiss tells JJ that they are here to celebrate not just Henry but her and Will. They have a lot to be proud of even though the road has been hard and very, very long to get here. We finally get our sweet Jemily bestie moment. Who better to let her know she’s thought of than Prentiss?
Then, I love how Rossi gets onto the ones talking shop at the party. Come on, y’all, no work talk while partying. Of course, Auntie P arranges a family photo. They successfully get one family photo before all their photos go off. Although it isn’t funny at all, Michael making light of it was hilarious. I love when the boys are included because they make every scene they are in fun. For Henry, Go Bobcats!
After the case is over, JJ and Penelope look through a photo album. JJ said she wouldn’t reminisce, but she does anyway (because her boys are growing up). Luke walks in with the boys, with Henry dressed to the tens. He looks all grown up in the suit that Auntie P and Luke helped him get. Michael tones down the emotional moment by letting everyone know he’s hungry. Luke tells Henry to take his suit for a spin because they are meeting the team for a late-night dinner.
West Virginia case
The West Virginia case drops in their laps when a teen wilderness group discovers the body of 65-year-old Sharon Fussel in Darrington Reserve. Unfortunately, she’s the second woman (the first being Janice) to be found within the last week in that area. The women had their eyes glued open, and blood drained phlebotomy-style. The eyes weren’t glued until after their deaths, leading the team to believe the unsub is more comfortable interacting with his victims once they’re dead.
Prentiss lets the team know the nature area has turned the case over to the West Virginia State Police and hands out tasks. Finally, we get new pairs as Tara is out helping Rebecca with Voit. JJ and Tyler are interviewing the friends and family while Rossi and Luke review the autopsy report. Prentiss warns them that disturbing the hunting ground won’t slow this unsub down.
Tyler and JJ meet with Sharon’s husband. He reveals that when he went to identify her, it looked like she was still alive. It was like he only needed to shake her awake. Unfortunately, she was gone. Just two months ago, the day after his birthday, she disappeared following their move to the senior home. He explains he didn’t think security cameras were worth the money, causing him to blame himself for his wife’s disappearance. Tyler calmly assures him it wasn’t his fault.
JJ’s next question about enemies leads us to discover that Sharon was adored by everyone, which makes it even harder to understand why she was targeted. Then, his next comment stubs them: Why would the unsub change her clothes? She was wearing her jogging outfit when she left the house that day but wasn’t found in that outfit. Janice was also changed into different clothes.
Both women were changed after their deaths into clothes that didn’t belong to them. Even stranger is that their clothes aren’t from the same decades, like most unsubs who model their victims after someone and their styles. As Rossi, Tyler, and JJ unravel that mystery, Luke walks in with even more confusing discoveries. The autopsy uncovered that the women had embalming fluids and magnesium (which is the white liquid he fed them) in their systems, which was part of his process to make them admirable to him.
Witness Protection updates
Tara skips hellos and moves right into Voit’s request to break witness protection rules and check on his family. They try to tell him the Witness Protection Program is the safest place for his family, given one of their own is in WPP (Longtime fans might remember the explanation for Thomas Gibson’s abrupt departure from the original run in 2016, when Rossi explained that Hotch and Jack were in the Witness Protection Program.)
Voit begs them to reconsider, but Tara redirects and tries to get him to explain his sudden fear for his family. Honestly, I’m a little surprised that he doesn’t confess he met his “fan” and was most likely threatened with something in the mysterious folder. Even without this knowledge, Tara and Rebecca give into Voit’s fears and promise to find out what they can do. Despite everything, I think Voit regrets having his family in danger because of his crimes.
Voit may not have told Josh Ryan’s secret to the BAU, but Tara and Rebecca bring a recording of his last visit to Prentiss. They think Voit being scared for his family’s safety has something to do with this third visit in three days. They think the photo in the mysterious folder is of Voit’s family and essentially spooked him. Josh’s glasses were made to hide his face from the security cameras with a blinding light, which makes Prentiss fully believe this is Voit’s “fan.”
The evidence keeps pointing to this discovery when Josh slipped up and checked in with a keychain similar to his first kill’s artwork. It is far more likely that “the fan” pulled one over on Alex. They immediately need to bring Alex in for questioning. Meanwhile, Voit is haunted by his decision not to tell Tara and Rebecca himself about “the fan." Little does he know, they know he kept the truth hidden and are looking into it.
Tara and Rebecca meet with Mr. Ryan about his cousin meeting with Voit. He tells them he just couldn’t meet with Voit himself as his ex-wife did, so he sent his cousin in his place. Turns out, Josh reached out to him after thirty years with a PHD in Criminology under his belt. Not surprising at all, he wasn’t shy about letting Mr. Ryan know that he wanted to write a book about serial killers, so meeting Voit seemed like a good plan.
Mr. Ryan is shocked to learn that Josh wasn’t actually his cousin even though he knew everything about his family. He not only researched Voit but also the victim’s family to get in to see Voit (especially after the restricted access). Unfortunately, besides email exchanges and the last one bouncing back, Mr. Ryan hasn’t heard from Josh again.
As much as I dislike Voit at times, it is hard not to feel bad for him. After he finishes shooting hoops, he flashes back to a memory of him and his oldest daughter. He’s teaching her how to drive before she’s even gotten her permit. It is their little secret, a fun daddy-daughter memory that he is holding like a lifeline to his family. The memory ends and Tara and Rebecca walk in and confront him about knowing about his meetings with “the fan.”
He doesn’t hide that the photo was of his family, but they assure him his family is okay and that photo could have been taken a long time ago. Even though his family is safe, they are tightening security for his family. He has to talk to help them further. He can’t profile like them, and he has to accept help while “the fan” peeks around in his blind spots.
Fielder County Funeral Home
In the opening scene in Fielder County, WV, Marvin, the funeral director, is meeting with two clients when they decide the prices are too high and postpone discussing details until later. After the meeting, he walks down to the morgue to greet his current body to let someone know she is ready for burial. Then he opens one of the cabinet doors and pulls out another woman’s body to stare at it. He puts on a grief book and prepares the next woman’s on his table. But what happens next confuses me. The woman asks him to stop as he drains her blood. He calms her down, continuing his process.
Marvin slowly washes the woman’s legs while he talks on the phone. He’s so cheery as he lets a family know when to come back by for their appointment. His sign-off is even kind as he clicks off the call and returns to his grief book. I’m not sure what I was expecting from how he glued their eyes open, but it wasn’t the gentleness he applied to their eyelids with glue on a Q-tip. The scene grows darker as his next victim screams to let her go as she’s chained up in the bathroom. Abandoning his audiobook, he goes into the bathroom and fills the woman’s mouth with a strange white liquid. She spits it into his face and proceeds to try to get the rest out of her system. But he simply wipes his face and does it again as she struggles.
Later on, he poses as his latest victim. He brushes her hair and styles her arms as an old-time camera waits to be clicked. The pose makes more sense when the portrait behind him is shown again. The portrait is of a woman and her dog, and she’s posed in the same way the unsub poses his victims. I believe that woman is his mother, given he looked at it when he talked to the couple about her passing in the opening scene of the episode. He may not be styling them similarly in the way of clothes but by poses in their portraits, portraits the team hasn’t uncovered yet.
New dumping ground
As the team is trying to uncover what happened to Sharon and Janice, Penelope brings Luke new evidence. This body leads to a new dumping ground in Fielder County, WV, where the unsub is torturing, admiring, and posing his victims at his funeral home. This place is a stone's throw away from Darrington Reserve. He grabs Rossi and heads over to the new site.
Rossi and Luke arrive at the crime scene and learn that Chloe was reported missing three weeks ago. As they study the new victim, more details become a little clearer. Chloe was 23, making her two decades younger than Sharon, who was a decade older than Janice. While his victims are getting younger, the clothes become more dated, as if he were honoring someone who has passed. Rossi and Luke bet on the clothes being the deceased family member’s and hope there’s some DNA left behind to identify her.
The BAU team finally gets a DNA profile from the clothes that matches all of their characteristics. They still have to wait on the identity of the unknown woman whom the unsub is mirroring. In the meantime, they piece together that the unsub is using film photography to hold onto his victims while discarding their physical forms. They expand their search to mortuaries and embalmers who have lost a female family member. That search is paused when the latest victim’s name comes up; Grace only talked to her mom three days ago, so she doesn’t have much time.
Penelope uncovers the identity of the unsub’s relative, Katrina Bancroft, who died in a single car accident six months ago. She drove off a cliff with all her belongings. She owned the funeral home that Marvin (her son) works at. All of the portraits of his mother (taken on her birthday for 68 years) are what Marvin was trying to get compensation on but was denied.
Grace tries to escape
The latest victim tries to break free while the unsub listens to old music and develops his portraits of Chloe. The unsub admires his mother’s urn, whispering to her that he has something to tell her. While he is distracted, the woman breaks free from the cuff with a strangled cry of pain.
While the team is looking for her, Grace is trying everything she can to get out of the bathroom she’s locked in. Her breaking the glass in the door causes an alert on the unsub’s phone. He ends his phone call, still polite as ever, and abandons his drawing of his mother. Grace comes at him from behind and stabs him with a piece of glass. She runs upstairs but finds the door locked. Just before she can reach another door, he shocks her with a stun gun, sending her to the floor.
With the address obtained, they are off to find him, but it may be too late for Grace. He proceeds with his process while Grace is strapped to the table. She wakes up as he cleans up her wounded hand from where she broke the glass. As a last resort, Grace talks to Marvin about his mother after she sees the urn in the other room. It is creepy how calm he is as she struggles to keep him from killing her. Despite them learning each other’s names, he starts draining her blood.
The BAU breaks into the funeral home, sending an alert to Marvin’s phone. The blood is draining from Grace as her head shifts back and forth. He screams and locks himself in the room with his mother’s urn. Luke and JJ try to help Grace before confronting Marvin and sending Grace outside with another officer. Marvin won’t leave his mother, even though she’ll always be with her. JJ connects to him with her role as a mom. He whispers his mother’s motto and turns his gun on them. They shoot him just in time, sending him and his mother’s urn to the ground.
“The Fan” and Laura
Prentiss confirms there is a method to “the fan’s” madness, so she and Tara go over the timeline. After eight weeks of the unknown, we finally see “the fan” face when we revisit the case from the end of episode 2 at the college campus. He strangled her and took a trophy.
A week later, the podcast happened, and “the fan” listened. The pathetic comment made him respond a week later to Voit, and then the photos a week later. Only two days later, Lance is kidnapped and used to call into the podcast. Then, there was silence for a week before he threatened his family with the photo. They worry that “the fan” knew the team was out of town, so he saw an opportunity to get to Voit.
All of it makes sense except Laura and Lance’s involvement. They both played such key parts but have no connections to Voit or the family. They think Voit is lying, but Prentiss doesn’t believe he is. For once, she thinks Voit is wrong.
With all of that, Laura means something to “the fan,” and oddly enough, both she and Lance aren’t being monitored anymore. As Tara calls, Rebecca Prentiss tells her that Laura needs to be put back in protected custody because “the fan” poses a real threat to her. We flash to Laura getting in her car after work as someone stares at her. After ending the call with her mom, “the fan” appears from her backseat and strangles her.
The next episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution airs July 16 on Paramount+.
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